Week 3

QUESTIONS THAT ROSE FROM MONDAY'S LECTURE

The idea of “giving something for nothing”.⇒ we use hotmail, google, MySpace for free for ex. What do they get in return?

Is a virtual meeting less dangerous then a real/face to face meeting?
What do virtual communities bring to users? (Make friends? Create yourself an entire new personality? Business opportunities?…)
Second Life: what does it bring to people? Commercial tool? Does being/spending time on Second Life cuts you out of the reality? After spending so much time online/chatting “virtually”, can you still interact with people in person, or is it too intimidating?

Second Life could be something we could explore in more detail in our group project.

REFLECTIONS

I realised this week that I was getting more secure with the idea of reflecting on this blog. It gives me the opportunity to organize myself in term of work/time/research. It allows me to see my progress (but also the group’s progress) throughout the weeks. We went from one idea (focusing on the Fluokids) and ended up with completely different plans.

We realised this week that it would be difficult for us to focus on the “Fluokids”. The main problem with this emerging youth group is that there is not much information online, especially in English. Their main blog is in French and I am the only one speaking French in the group. Also, most of the information provided is about their upcoming parties and not about the history/creation of the group.

We decided to construct our project in the following way:
Have a core structure based on theories (definition of online communities/ idea of nationalism/shared identity within a group; then introduce different examples supporting these various statements.
Should we include a debate maybe?
Are we going to find “black and white” information or is it all going to be biased?
What do online communities involve? Economy/advertising/manipulation of big companies?

Mette is going to make some research in Benedict Anderson’s book; “Imagined Communities” that she already knows.


MY MAIN CONCERNS FOR FUTURE WORK/REASEARCH

Find reliable sources.
Focus our project on the “Online Communities” = not to overlap (too much) with the theme of “Identity”.


RESEARCH FOR THIS WEEK:

We tried to map out an approximate outline of our group project. According to the outline, we divided research among ourselves:
Mette is going to put on our group wiki a first approximative outline of our project.
All members of the group have different areas they have to research on.

I have to:

Look at online journals regarding “online/Virtual communities” through Lexis-Nexis (University’s online database)
Research about:
Second Life – very visual/ “virtual”
MySpace – more creative
Facebook – basic graphics
Moodle
Elgg
Other interesting online communities

Generating ideas...

Fluokids

I read loads of articles about this group in Paris and thought it would be interesting to have a quick look at what they do:


http://www.dazeddigital.com/projects/digital50/article.aspx?a=539

http://www.fluokids.blogspot.com/

http://www.myspace.com/fluokids

it is a whole new generation of young kids who cannot spend a minute without having constant access to Internet/MySpace/ Emails... they created a "party community" which communicates online and meets in different Clubs around the world to party!

Week 2: preparation/organization of the group project

Monday: we had the first meeting in our group regarding the group project. For the moment, no specific roles have been attributed to the members of the group except for Mette who is going to take care if the site/product design. We want to wait a little bit until we have a more precise idea of what we are going to focus on in the "Virtual Communities" theme.

We started our communal Wiki page and agreed to name our group "Virtual4". For the moment, the group seems to agree/compromise on different decisions. I hope this project is going to be the result of real group work in which we can count on each other in terms of advice/help/support/information finding. It may sound strange that I stress the idea of unity in a group, but I have experienced previously some difficult situations regarding group work.

For today, we have decided to browse individually through some ideas and meet in order to start mapping out what we want to focus on.

Week 1 ... reflection

I find it quite intimidating to reflect on my work by using a blog as for me, personal reflection is something very personal.

I think having a blog and communicating information through it to my group is going to be easier then writing an email as we can post music, videos and links.

I am in a group with Mette, Leda and Khristina. Our theme for our project is "Virtual communities".
For next week, we each have find ideas about Virtual communities so that we can start mapping out more precisely what we want to focus on in our project.

Hello everyone!